BTG 139 - Relearning the Basics

[Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of breaking the guard. On today's episode, I wanted to talk about relearning the basics. This is something that I do repeatedly, but I think there's some nuggets that we can uncover here that perhaps especially I think I have a somewhat older audience. So, chances are if you've been listening to me, you've been training for quite some time and you might think it's beneath you to go to a beginner's class or to go and maybe go to a seminar that's teaching stuff that you feel is very fundamental to your skill set. So, it's not really bringing anything new to the table. But, I would like to shed some light on things that I feel you can actually get a lot of benefit from. One is the chances of you having 100% mastery of a technique is probably 0%. Because there's so much that can be uncovered. Like someone like myself who's been practicing doing kimoras for decades now, I still don't think I'm in the 99 percentile of efficiency of a kimora. I would say maybe in the 90% territory and that's perhaps being a bit too bold. So I'm trying to say there's a lot right even like someone myself who considers himself an expert in the subject matter. That being said, this topic came up to me because I went to train with uh Jake Shields at Extreme Couture like I typically do. He teaches there Tuesday, Thursdays uh a pro fighting session that's mainly grappling from 11 to 12. Sometimes I teach that class as well as you guys probably know when you see me teaching there. But in any case, I went and he was teaching top crucifix positions. Uh which is funny because I had taught that for the past week when he was gone. So, I was curious to make cuz the topics fresh in my head and I was curious how his take was going to be on it and pretty similar as far as how we set up the crucifix. What was different was the way he opted to control what I would call the bottom side arm, which is like the side your legs are on. Traditionally, at least from how I've learned it, we always triangled that arm. So, uh, you know, if his arm was sticking out like this, I would make a triangle, wrap it around, and now, uh, have the elbow under my knees so that my thighs are closer to their shoulder. Right? And this typically works pretty well, especially if you have the legs very high up. And we generally like to keep chest pointing down rather than chest pointing up. A lot of people like tend to overcommit to trying to punch and get heavy punches and then get rolled back or it's just too much space. When we're like chest to chest, shorter, but for elbows, it works fine. uh he opted for uh shin pinning. So using uh again if you imagine the opponent's head is on this side where my fingertips are, my head is my fingertips over here. He would use the his right leg to shin pin their left arm and he would also switch off. He could also shin pin with the left shin. Right. Um, I've done this before and sometimes when you lose the the triangle, which can happen as they're wiggling out, I would switch to a shin pin and then recover the triangle. But he never even discussed going into a triangle. So, I'm not sure if that's just not even an option for him, like he won't do it at all, which would be curious to me, or it's just that he just prefers the shin pinning. The shin pinninging is solid. I think there's a little uh in certain circumstances better control as far as uh you can keep good weight in it. I think your base is probably a little better since you're not focusing on trying to keep your triangle. But in any case, it was interesting to see his take on it and um made me consider, oh, you know, like uh maybe I should explore this a little bit more as far as the benefits of using shin pins to maintain the crucifix versus using triangle. And lo and behold, after playing around with it, you know, during our my spare time, I ended up uncovering what might be a new position or at least is new to me, which is using the bottom leg shin pin. So, in that same example, fingertips are the head using my left leg to pin their left arm so that my right leg that's close to the head is free. Uh, I then found, well, I can pick up his head and shelf his head on top of my quad kind of like how you would for like an Smount. And this creates a very heavy position because now my hips are directly on top of his left shoulder. So now that shin pin is super heavy. I still have the other arm cuffed here. And that one's really tight. And he can't really bridge anymore because his head now is off the ground so high. He can't turn into me because his head's caught in a vice inside the pocket of my my torso, my my my quad. And now the only way he can really turn is away from me. But now he's directly in that path into that downward elbow. So, uh, seems pretty nasty and at least playing around with it in training, uh, just drilling it or, you know, I played the bottom guy. I had my partner play the bottom guy. I had Jake come over to play around with it. We all seem to think, man, this seems pretty solid, you know. So, now I have to experiment with this. And I probably will, well, I I won't probably I will be trying to do this on every single person I grapple in the foreseeable future to get some real like field results. Uh but it this would have never come to pass if I wasn't training something that to me was something I quote unquote already knew, right? Uh in fact, I was teaching this. So this is where I feel having a an open mind into constantly trying to learn new things and not just saying, "Oh, I know this now. I don't need to even look at any new information." That is going to leave you closed off and your progress is going to be minimal. Whereas when I'm going into any class, my goal is to humble myself immediately enough so that whoever is teaching, I can learn from them. If you think just because you have more experience and more skill and more credentials and all these things that that makes anybody that's beneath what you consider your level unable to teach you, guess what? You're going to be right. You're not going to learn anything from them. Even if they did have some amazing nuggets because you've just closed off your mind. I know. I've attended a few seminars where uh I came in by surprise and I remember one of them I think it was actually Brandon McCarron who's a great guy and he's obviously blown up quite a bit now but this was before I think he uh achieved the lowest because as he had he was just doing a 10th planet seminar and I just showed up and he looked like he was a little like starruck slash a little humbled that I would be there to attend his seminar and he he made a few comments during the seminar like oh you know like he couldn't believe that I was doing his seminar and uh well it's appreciated I think obviously he was wrong there's things I can learn from anybody we could have a white belt go out there and teach and I will learn something from that person it might be how not to do something right but I can learn from that and that's still a useful lesson um of course Brandon taught me things he's and I think this is another direction of this whereas when you are learning about things that you know but from a different source there is going to be different emphasis right so for example with the the Jake Shields reference with the crucifixes. We have very different backgrounds as far as I came from Gondo into wrestling and then I got into shoot fighting and didn't train Brazilian jiu-jitsu under a Brazilian until I was already competing in world championships in the ACC. So, I don't have a BJJ background, right? Jake, on the other hand, I believe he came started from wrestling, then got into fighting through jiu-jitsu and, you know, training with Gracies. So, I think he has more of a traditional jiu-jitsu background, although he was into MMA pretty early in as well, I believe, if I understand correctly. Uh the guys from Caesar Gracie are pretty hardcore. They're not uh they're not watered down jiu-jitsu. So um regardless, our backgrounds are going to be different. So whatever techniques that we learned all have a different tint to it. And I've noticed this because he teaches a lot of simple things that I look at like he was showing arm triangles and I talked about this before on the podcast like different emphasis on things that for me clicked and allowed me to get much better uh I just had a brain fart there to get much better execution on my my submission holds just because these are details that weren't emphasized when I learned the technique. Right. So when especially like for me when I do 10th planet seminars like I did one with Eddie Bravo I think I did one with u with Brandon uh I had Alan Belchure was not exactly a 10th planet product but he trained the systems also you know teach stuff at our gym. I learned a lot because they're very different schools of thought right from how I've done things. So even though they might be teaching a mounted arm bar, which of course I've done, the things they emphasize are very different. So this is something that there's value in cross trainining as far as going to other schools or you know when you're traveling or whatnot or just by getting instructional content whether it's online stuff or you know DVDs which are a bit archaic now but uh you know when you are able to look how other people teach the basics there is a lot lot of utility in that and of course learning stuff that you don't know about is useful as well. There can come a point where well you know that's harder nowadays. There's so much technique now that I think like again even me being in this game for almost 30 years now there's still a lot of things that are just totally out of my element. you know, all the the rubber guard stuff is a little over my head just because I can't really organize myself into the position to begin with. Uh I understand most of the the defenses of getting out of these. I think I've only been caught once in a rubber guard submission and that was actually recently. Uh but uh other than that, I've been able to stay clear of it. So like I know enough about the fundamentals to defend myself from them, but there's a lot of intricacy there and I want to be able to get to be able to use it more. Uh because I there's obviously great value in being able to do that. I've seen the people who are good at it like uh if you guys seen I've talked about this kid Jordan Worth and he is very dangerous in that position and it's very easy to get himself there because of the way he's able to move his body. So, uh I've seen also in MMA it can be used effectively. You can't force it, but uh when people try to hug you and keep you they're grounded, if you know how to do rubber guard, you're going to put them in a lot of problems because they're going to have to back up, which then isn't going to give you the space to stand up if you wanted to, right? So, any case, uh point being that there's a lot of stuff now and even the whole leg lock game is now so many games within that game, right? Back in the day, if you're a leg lock guy, it just meant like you were doing heel hooks from, you know, what we call ashurami, right? And now there's like, well, are you a 50/50 guy, 50 guy, are you a saddle, you know, guy? And now that's there's now inside 50/50 backside 50/50. So like all these positions are now have their own subpositions. And then each of those sub positions also have like different sets of submissions to go for. So um there's nothing that's truly like super basic anymore. Like everything can get very complex. Uh and that's just a credit to the innovation that's happening in jiu-jitsu. And I think also not necessarily like all these are all new things. They might have been done before, but I don't think they've ever been as well organized as they have been now where it's easier to find these things and to be able to look them up and to be able to access this information, right? I can just go online and start YouTubing things. And if I wanted to learn backside 50/50, I can just type backside 50/50 and I'm going to get a a plethora of things to look through and I can start piecing together knowledge, right? But uh that was harder to do back in the day, right? And the names weren't first of all, you didn't have any where you could just type in and look it up maybe and there wasn't really a lot of books on this type of stuff anyways. So even if you went to a library, you wouldn't be able to find it easily. And even just going by names was tricky because everybody had all sorts of different names. Uh there's still some things that uh particularly because I'm always trying to look for new uh techniques, new ideas, or merging things. Some things are still hard for me to find, believe it or not, just because I can't find a good name for the the move or position. So, I don't know how to search for it. But I mean, a little sidetracked there. But regardless, the learning or relearning the basics is a useful thing to do, especially if you find that maybe you are not as strong in certain positions that you would like to be that are fundamental, right? Maybe, for example, your mounted arm bars are not that great. And it's just it's not a like a hole in your game because you just don't make that your thing. But why shouldn't it be? Let's relearn the basics. Let's watch some content about mounted arm bars. Let's go to a beginner class by somebody that you don't normally train under and see how they would teach that, right? Or go to a seminar that would teach that. Because if you come in with an open mind, I promise you, you're going to learn something, right? It might not be the the one thing that you were missing, but it might be the thing that you were doing that now you know why you shouldn't be doing, right? And learning negative lessons is just as valuable, sometimes more valuable than learning positive lessons. In any case, give it a try. I do it all the time. It's it's rare nowadays where I'm in a class where I'm totally out of my element and I don't know what's going on, right? Not saying it doesn't happen. Uh but it's very rare for that to happen where I'm just totally in a new universe. It's usually I seen most of these things, but now I'm seeing it through a different lens. And that is still extremely helpful. In fact, in some cases more helpful because I have context about this move now and seeing it from a different perspective now is able to shed some light that makes that move a lot more effective for me. And in certain cases, like in my example I gave gives me new insight to be able to innovate and try to create new positions and new techniques based off this new information that I got. So give it a try and let me know how that works out for